Birthday Pool Party

A couple of months before my little one turned 6, I told my boys that we were going to scale back this year and have smaller birthday parties.  They didn't complain so we moved forward with our plan.  I am still able to influence the little one's decisions on birthday parties - this year I suggested a pool party and he was GAME!  With my mom and nephew in town along with two other families (parents included - no life guard needed!) we hosted a fun pool party for his 6th birthday!

While pregnant with my first child, I ran across an image of a pool party birthday cake in a parenting magazine and told myself I would do that someday.  After viewing a few more images for inspiration, I created this cake - complete with a blue Jell-O pool, and of course a used #6 candle.  He is the 2nd child, he gets a lot of hand-me-downs.  He didn't care that the piping wasn't perfect and the white frosting didn't entirely cover the red velvet cake - he LOVED it!

For the invitations, I used some of my stockpile of beach balls (we buy them when they are like 25 cents at the end of the season), blew them up, used a Sharpie to add the details, let dry, deflated, and shipped.  I saw the idea on Oriental Trading - but since I only had a few to make, decided to go big or go home instead of purchasing the smaller version.  Our guests had a lot of fun blowing them up and then sharing the details with their kids!  Although, my mom told my son that she usually stuck the party invitations to her refrigerator....he told her she needed to blow it up and play with it!  :)

When I asked my little one, what he wanted to serve at his party, his first response was "Cocktails! For the adults!" - that was a super proud parenting moment for me.  We did serve a signature cocktail - a Harvey Wallbanger - a bit of a story behind that one - but stay tuned for a separate blog post!

He also asked for chicken nuggets and PB&J - we agreed on chicken nuggets, fruit, and veggies.  We love Chick-fil-A for nugget trays and purchased our fruit tray from them as well.  I also served "beach balls" (aka cheese balls) and "pool noodles" (aka Twizzlers Rainbow Candy Twists).

For the kiddos, we served "pool water" (aka blue Kool-Aid) - this was a complete copy/paste from my friend Gretchen who served this last year at her daughter's birthday party.  Yes, that is her awesome dispenser that we use at our Easter parties.  I told her I was going to fill with Powerade - she convinced me that Kool-Aid was the better choice - she was right.  This entire dispenser was consumed by 8 kids.....OK, over the course of about 7 hours...when you have a small party, overstayers are a guarantee...

Lastly, for the party favors, I purchased these flip-flop straws and attached to a set of three cake pops. Each guest received one beach ball cake pop and two decorated cake pops - they LOVED them! Thanks to  Claire's Cute Cakes for making them - they were a HUGE hit!!!

I purchased those adorable gift tags from Lauren Haddox Design on Etsy.  Easy.

A huge thanks to my mom for assembling the party favors!!!

We had a wonderful time celebrating the little guy's 6th birthday!  I hope you are inspired by some of these ideas!

A Little Shopping on Etsy for the Skylanders Birthday Party

In August, I hosted my son's 7th birthday party and as you know from following my blog, the theme this year was Skylanders.  Unclear on what that means?  Skylanders is an interactive game where the figurine of each Skylander comes to life through the Portal of Power and the player can then manipulate that character on the screen through various video game systems (we use the Wii, but it can be played on XBOX, Playstation, etc).  It's pretty cool, actually.  You can read all about Skylanders at www.skylanders.com.

There aren’t a lot of party supplies out in the market yet for Skylanders, like what you would find at Party City.  So I headed to Etsy to do some shopping when I started to plan this.  For the invitations, I found these very cool Skylander cards from DenimGraphics, pictured here.  My son was able to choose the Skylander he wanted to feature on his invitation and then I provided the details to create it.  What I purchased was an image that I could print myself or take somewhere to be printed.  She also offered a print option through her store, so I went that route.  When they arrived I was so pleased!  They looked great – printed, cut, and ready to go with envelopes included.

 

To add a personalized touch to the decorations, I purchased images to make a banner from Kid Invitations.  This came out looking great!  I decided that I could handle taking these to Office Max for the printing.  After cutting them, I added larger orange circles to each of them, hole punched, and assembled with twine. 

 

 

 I also found some very cute personalized party favor tags from Lulu Cole on Etsy.  Again, this was an image I purchased and these went with me to Office Max for printing.  Then they just needed to be cut out, hole punched, and tied to our party favors.  

Each of these Etsy stores provided me with excellent customer service and quick turnaround times – for which I was very grateful!  What shopping on Etsy have you done?

Choo-Choo Train Birthday Party

I recently threw a party for my little one's 3rd birthday - at his request, it was a "Choo-Choo Train" Birthday Party!  I had a lot of fun planning and executing this one!  I experienced some "scope creep" in the last few days of the party preparations, but that's to be expected!  Maybe I should just plan for that next time!

I designed the train ticket invitation in MS Publisher, I usually use Photoshop, but decided to give Publisher a try.  It was quite easy!  I found several ideas from the internet and then built it from there!  I used a small hole punch for the month and day to make it even more authentic!

For the cake, I had this design in my head - but wasn't really sure how it was going to come together until I started to decorate it!  My son wanted a white cake with white frosting!   I used Wilton Sugar Sheets to make the tunnel and the black on the railroad crossing signs, a simple black decorating gel for the train tracks, I made fondant from scratch and added some yellow food coloring for the signs, and grabbed a few items from my boys' train table to complete the look!  I also added a train ribbon around the bottom of the cake stand as a finishing touch.

I got the idea for the little round signs from Phoenix Event Planning, I did make those in Photoshop, printed 2 copies onto heavy paper, inserted a wooden skewer in between the two pieces of paper, and glued them together. 

The blue gingham plates and napkins were from Oriental Trading Company, I bought red forks from Party City and found the red bandana ribbon from Michael's. 

For the buffet, I made a train track using tan felt and cut rails out of black felt.  I used small tins to which I attached paper wheels as "snack cars" and lined up a couple of other rectangular plates behind them for serving.   On the menu I served many of my little one's favorites!  We had chicken nuggets, tortellini, mixed berries, watermelon, "train" cheese and crackers, and I made wraps for the adults as well.  The wraps were a big hit, I found the idea from On My Side Of The Room. 

For the favors, I bought red and navy bandanas as well as the engineer caps from Oriental Trading.  I was leery of the whistles from Oriental Trading based upon the reviews, so I ended up buying them from Aero1Toys on Etsy.  We had three babies, under the age of one, at the party, I thought it was a little much to give them the same favors as the older children, so I found some cute, soft, jingle balls with trains on the fabric at the LittleLadybugz store on Etsy.  I wrapped a red bandana around them and they were ready to go!   Lastly, I found these cute tags from Hello, Good Gravy! that were ready to download, print, and cut out! 

Overall, the party was a big success!  Both the kids and the parents had a great time!  Thanks to everyone who helped me pull this together!  Enjoy the photos below - special thanks to Gretchen Wakeman Photography who took most of the photos and I added a couple of my own! 

 

 

 

 

The Buffet!

The Cake!  Photo Courtesy of Gretchen Wakeman Photography at www.gretchenwakeman.com



The Party Favors!  Photo Courtesy of Gretchen Wakeman Photography at www.gretchenwakeman.com





 

Number Themed Birthday Party

A party for a 2 year old....

When my youngest son turned two, I went a little crazy with the "2" theme!  But I loved the end result! Idea for the cake and the colors came from the hostess of all hostesses, Martha.  You can find the how to on the cake here:  Number Themed Cake

I made the 2s for the cupcakes out of a simple fondant created right in the microwave combining marshmallows, water, powdered sugar, and shortening until I got to that right consistency.  I have a set of very small numbers and letters cookie cutters that I used for the 1 year old party (check out THAT party idea!) and it worked perfectly to create the 2s on the cupcakes.

The frosting for the cake and the cupcakes was a tried and true buttercream recipe from Wilton.  Buyer beware on the vibrantly colored frosting - for those who ate the cupcakes, we were a little surprised to see blue and green in the potty the next day! 

The favors were giant Rice Krispie treats in the shape of a 2 dipped in melted white chocolate and decorated with polka dot icing.  To create the favors, I made large batches of the treats and developed my own template of a 2 using  WordArt in MS Publisher, cut it out, then traced the 2 with a small knife to get them out of the pan. 

We also had snacks complete with a tray of cheese and crackers where I took a 2 cookie cutter to slices of cheese!

I hope this will inspire you to throw a number themed party!